


A Knight Like No Other

by ineptshieldmaid



Category: Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Crossdressing, F/M, Gender Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 18:41:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineptshieldmaid/pseuds/ineptshieldmaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's funny, he thought later, how much the clothes became the person. How little you knew them, with something else on. It wasn't that he hadn't known by then that Alanna was a girl, but sometimes he could go whole days without thinking of it, and then it would come back in a rush, at some perfectly normal moment. <i>That's Alanna; that's my squire there, pouring wine, and she's a </i>girl<i>. No one knows my squire's a girl.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Knight Like No Other

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liesofdesire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesofdesire/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Squire With Prospects](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637195) by [ineptshieldmaid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineptshieldmaid/pseuds/ineptshieldmaid). 



> Happy Yuletide, liesofdesire!
> 
> This fic can be read as a companion piece to _A Squire With Prospects_ , which I wrote for m_shell in Yuletide 2008. No prior knowledge of that fic is necessary to read this one, but they do interpret some common events from different points of view, and share some common themes.
> 
> Thanks to Trojie and Kayloulee for beta'ing this work for me!

The first time Jonathan saw Alanna in a dress, he didn't recognise her.

It's funny, he thought later, how much the clothes became the person. How little you knew them, with something else on. It wasn't that he hadn't known by then that Alanna was a girl, but sometimes he could go whole days without thinking of it, and then it would come back in a rush, at some perfectly normal moment. _That's Alanna; that's my squire there, pouring wine, and she's a_ girl _. No one knows my squire's a girl._

He liked that feeling. Knowing something that no one else knew (except for George, George, always George). Not just having something that no one else had, having something no one else even knew they were missing out on.

'You're wearing a dress. You look -' he stumbled, and shut himself up. He hadn't been about to say _good_ , or _different_ or _beautiful_ or even _slightly terrified_ , all of which would have been true, if tactless, observations. He'd been about to say _you look wrong_. Wrong, like she was wearing someone else's clothes. Like the wrong kind of girl. Not like his Alanna at all.

The first time Jon saw Alanna in a dress, he wanted to tear it off her. Not in a _let me sweep you off your feet and divest you of this unnecessary clothing, my lady_ kind of way. In a _by all the gods, squire, get rid of this ridiculous outfit at once_ kind of way.

He thinks about that, later. He thinks about the fact that Alanna can wear dresses if she wants to. He thinks about the fact that Alanna _is_ a girl, and don't all girls like pretty dresses? He thinks that Alanna shouldn't like dresses, because Alanna's not that kind of girl, she's _his_ Alanna, and his Alanna doesn't wear dresses.

It took some weeks before he thought about how much he'd like to tear that dress off her, and realised that if he tore the dress off her, Alanna would be naked.

It took some weeks before he realised that, for all he feels a bit strange about Alanna seeing him naked, he'd never thought about her naked before. He’d kissed her, that time by the Drell River, he thought about the fact that she’s a girl, his girl, his girl-squire, _all the time_ : but he’d never thought about her naked.

After that, it became hard to stop.

* * *

Jon never did get to tear any of Alanna’s dresses off her. The first time he lay with her (if that was what you could call it - just a tangle of kisses and fingers, like the fumbling youths they were) she came to him in her night-gown. After that it was stolen moments in the evenings, getting under one another’s shirts and kicking off breeches, and occasional, precious mornings lying naked and tangled up together, shoving back the knowledge that someone could come looking for either or both of them at any time.

He knew she went into the city to Mistress Cooper’s house; that she kept dresses and wigs there as well as in her trunk here (privately, Jon thought the latter was an unnecessary risk - but he never dared say as much to Alanna). She spoke little of it to him, though, and Jon didn’t ask.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was that he wasn’t asking her.

Did she like them, the dresses? Did she wish she was one of the palace ladies, after all? Did George ever see her in dresses? Did she feel like a stranger when she wore them?

* * *

They had kept Alanna’s secret, together, for years, but this new secret, this thing between them which both was, and was not, to do with Alanna’s disguise: it made him giddy, made them both giddy and reckless. At first it was just a kiss or two in a corridor when no one was around, and then somehow they ended up in one of the libraries, Jon sprawled in a chair and Alanna on her knees between his legs. _This_ was something court ladies didn’t normally offer even to the Crown Prince, but Alanna had friends in the court of the Rogue - and it wasn’t as if the pages and squires were all blushing innocents, either. Word got around, and Alanna was a quick study.

They ought not to have been there, in a library where anyone could come in and find Prince Jonathan and his squire... It hit Jon suddenly, what anyone would think, if they walked in. The Crown Prince’s squire on his knees, and _oh_. Jon didn’t know if it was the thought of the secret which might be uncovered, or the one which might _not_ , but he couldn’t stop himself from groaning, pulling Alanna forward with one hand on the back of her head. She looked up at him, eyes wide and dark with want, and if anyone saw them right now, no one would see _her_.

Maybe Alanna was thinking the same thing, because she had one hand in her breeches, and when Jon collapsed backward into his chair, giddy and wrung out, her head dropped forward onto his stomach and she shuddered, long and deep.

They sprawled there, together, for a long time. After that, neither of them made any suggestion of public improprieties again.

* * *

As her Ordeal drew nearer, Alanna grew restless. She went into the city more and more often - Jon wasn’t entirely sure where, but he had a feeling it wasn’t to Mistress Cooper’s anymore. When they were alone, there was a new edge of desperation in the way she pressed against him, and Jon let himself be demanded of, made love to her hard and fast, lay down and held tight to her hands while she shuddered and gasped and came apart above and around him. And when that failed he dragged her out into the practice courts and fought her, with swords and staves and finally hand-to-hand, letting physical exertion overwhelm her fears.

* * *

Alanna looked like every other boy who had come before her, in the plain white clothes worn during the Ordeal of Knighthood. Pale, and somehow not quite there, as though the Ordeal had already begun somewhere in the back of her mind.

Jon tried not to think about what lay beyond the door. The Chamber of the Ordeal would know, of course. Bits of cloth and corsetry couldn’t fool the Chamber, that old, implacable power at the heart of the palace. Jon wondered if it would care, about Alanna. He suspected not, but that was no comfort. The Chamber might have been old, but it was never more than twelve months out of touch: every year, it had took the minds and hearts of young men and rifled through them. The Chamber knew how things stood. It knew about lies, it knew the way things ought to be and the way things were in truth.

The Chamber already knew about Alanna. Jon had told it himself. He was seventeen then, and things had changed, but nevertheless. The Chamber had gone through Jon’s mind and he’d given up secrets which were never his to give.

It was too much to hope that the Chamber would not use them against her.

* * *

‘Will you take a new squire?’ Alanna was sitting, cross-legged, on her bed. Her _new_ bed, Jon amended the thought: her belongings had all been removed from his chambers, and set up in quarters normally used for the working knights who came and went between border patrols. Alanna had stubbornly refused anything more permanent, and - much to Jon’s relief - likewise turned down Thom’s suggestion that she reside with him, in the spacious suite he occupied as Lord of Trebond.

Jon had been waiting for the question: Raoul, Alex, Roger (ye gods, _Roger_...) and even his own father had already asked him that. Gary, knowing more than any of them, had not asked: just watched them both, Jon and Alanna, when he thought Jon wasn’t watching him watching.

He set the bundle he was carrying down on the chest at the foot of the bed.

‘No,’ Jon said. He leaned back against the wall, folding his arms. ‘I... I could do with some privacy,’ he said. And it was true. One more person watching him, needing things from him, expecting him to be... exactly who he was. The thought of taking another squire filled him with resentment which went beyond Alanna. He didn’t say _if I can’t have you I won’t have anyone else_ , even though that was true, too.

Alanna just looked at him. Jon fought the urge to shuffle his feet.

‘I brought back your...’ he gestured toward the bundle lying on the chest.

‘Dresses, Jon,’ she said. ‘It’s not a dirty word.’ Leaning over, she pulled open the wrappings and extracted an expanse of purple fabric: the same gown he’d seen her in on her seventeenth birthday. She spread the skirt across her knees, hands gentle but her face hard. ‘I guess there’s no point hiding them, now.’

‘Alanna...’ He balled his hands up into fists, wanting to touch and not daring. He wanted to know what the silk felt like under his hands, what _she_ felt like under the silk. He’d wanted that since that first day in Mistress Cooper’s house, just as much as he’d wanted to strip her out of the gown and down to someone familiar again.

Jon wanted this, just once, while her secret still hung over them, new-revealed.

He laced her into the gown, tightening up the same ties he had once tried to remove. Alanna must have been able to tie them herself, of course, but she stood still and quiescent while he fumbled with the fastenings, more patient than he had ever been when she buckled on his armour.

‘Wait,’ she said, when he tipped her head up to kiss her. Jon hummed something against her lips, but she drew back.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, and this was seeming awfully familiar, wasn’t it. Alanna put her hands to her hair.

‘I should do this properly,’ she said, twisting her hair in her hands and holding it up above her ears. ‘I look...’

 _Like Squire Alan in a dress_ , Jon filled in for himself. He stepped back to look at her properly, and she looked young, more like the young squire who had defeated Sir Dain than the new-made knight who had slain Duke Roger. ‘No,’ he said, and it came out low and raspy. ‘This is... perfect.’

He didn’t even remove Alana’s gown, that night. He ran his hands over the silk, over the dense muscle of her body beneath it; kissed her mouth and neck and collarbone; gave up and spread his own arms wide while she wrestled his tunic and shirt off him. Then Jon knelt between her legs at the edge of the bed, worked the skirt up around her hips and turned his attention to another thing he could not do with court ladies, another trick picked up from overheard conversations in the court of the Rogue. He was well practiced at it by now, but never before had he, and perhaps never again would he, get to do this with the soft silk of a lady’s gown falling into his eyes and bunched up in his hand.

* * *

King Jonathan hadn't thought about what Alanna was going to wear for her formal presentation at court. Mourning colours, obviously; all of Tortall was wearing mourning right now. Alanna, whatever she wore, would draw attention, and Jon needed that: the pageantry surrounding a returned hero, and the Dominion Jewel.

Then the herald announced the Princess Thayet _jian_ Wilima's entry into the room, and Alanna with her, and - well, Jon had wanted pageantry, and by all the gods, Alanna had brought it to him.

Most women at court dressed as if the gowns wore _them_. Some, like Delia of Eldorne (and Jon still couldn't think of her without a bitter twist in his gut, because it didn't matter how long ago, he'd still thought, once...) wore their dresses like air, like they were _made_ to wear them. Thayet descended the stairs, flame-red amid the dull tones of the Tortallan court, and she wore her gown as though the very idea of dresses had been custom-built for her.

Jon stared, and stared. It was ridiculous: he’d seen Thayet before, there was no reason to gawp at her like a page-boy faced with a lady for the first time. And yet - and yet. Surely no more beautiful woman had ever, would ever descend that staircase.

As the two women reached the bottom of the stairs, Thayet’s bodyguard shadowing them, Jon realised that for the first time, his former squire looked entirely at ease with a lady on her arm. Next to Thayet, any woman ought to be inconsequential, but Alanna... he had loved her, missed her, resented her, known every inch of her body and every quirk of her temperament, and maybe there would never be a day when the sight of her didn’t light something warm and constant in his heart.

If the very concept of gowns had been waiting for Thayet to walk down those stairs and fulfil it, Alanna’s clothes had been dreamed up for her more recently than that. She looked _good_ , to Jon's eyes, in loose trousers and a long tunic which ought to have been awkward but instead simply set her apart: a knight like no other this court had seen.

**Author's Note:**

> One of my betas wanted me to use a particularly fantastic typo, 'she came to him in her knightgown' as the title, but I felt that would be a bit too silly.


End file.
